The World Wide Web (WWW) is comprised of an expansive network of interconnected computers upon which businesses, governments, groups, and individuals throughout the world maintain inter-linked computer files known as web pages. Users navigate these pages by means of computer software programs commonly known as Internet browsers. Due to the vast number of WWW sites, many web pages have a redundancy of information or share a strong likeness in either function or title. The vastness of the unstructured WWW causes users to rely primarily on Internet search engines to retrieve information or to locate businesses. These search engines use various means to determine the relevance of a user-defined search to the information retrieved.
The authors of web pages provide information known as metadata, within the body of the hypertext markup language (HTML) document that defines the web pages. A computer software product known as a web crawler systematically accesses web pages, by sequentially following hypertext links from page to page. The crawler indexes the pages for use by the search engines using information about a web page as provided by its address or Universal Resource Locator (URL), metadata, context, and other criteria found within the page. The crawler is run periodically to update previously stored data and to append information about newly created web pages. The information compiled by the crawler is stored in a metadata repository or database. The search engines search this repository to identify matches for the user-defined search rather than attempt to find matches in real time.
Current search engines use a variety of criteria to order matches to the user query and to rank the search results with higher quality pages listed at the top of the search list. Assessing quality involves both accurately matching the user query and identifying a useful, current web page. For instance, search engines may order the matches based on what is referred to herein as “static criteria”. Exemplary static criteria are the highest popularity, most recently updated, most visited, most queried, or most interconnected. It is common for users to limit the review of their search to only the first few matches of the search list.
For consumers searching the WWW for businesses, the search methods employed by current search engines provide incomplete information for the users to assess the quality of the businesses. The information provided by authors about their web sites, and the number of visits or queries received by a business site, typically reflect the quality of the web pages, but do not provide information about the quality of the business.
There is currently no adequate mechanism by which searches of business sites can be ordered based upon interactive criteria about the businesses themselves, correlating higher quality search matches to higher business satisfaction ratings. For example, popularity, is a commonly used static criterion which is determined by the number of visits or queries of business sites, and which may depend on advertising, strategic business alliances, or creative naming of a site, and is therefore independent of customers satisfaction with the ranked businesses. Therefore, there is still an unsatisfied need for a system and method that integrate user provided interactive criteria, such as customers and on-line users' satisfaction, with search engine results.